Patricia
Donegan
Essentials of Sora
Phonology
The basic prosody, phonology, and phonetics of Sora
(SRB) are the least areally influenced among the Munda languages. Despite some
recent publications, all known Sora dialects share a single phoneme inventory:
the vowels i e ɛ
ɨ ə ɑ u o ɔ and the consonants p t k b ɖ ɉ ɡ m n ɲ ŋ
s l r ɽ y
(Ɂ). The
presentation will demonstrate Sora vowel and consonant oppositions and
allophony and point out some individual traits of Sora: its phonemic retroflex
flap, its compressed-lip rather than rounded-lip u, its stød-like use of
glottal stop as a prosodic device, its absence of foreign phonemes, and its
restriction of initial n largely to demonstratives. Then I will discuss its
typically Munda features: the absence of vowel length or lexical diphthongs,
the t/ɖ asymmetry, the absence of c
despite ɉ, the identification of
unreleased coda stops as voiced not voiceless, and initial accent with
anacrusis allowed. Finally, I note some of its Austroasiatic features:
non-release of coda stops, diphthongization before palatal codas, and a rising
rhythm and head-first order in its polysynthetic verb stem, despite a typically
Munda (and Indian) falling syntactic rhythm. The rising verb rhythm is a
survival of the proto-Austroasiatic head-first verb phrase, which lives on in
the eastern Austroasiatic languages.